It has long been known that the United States is home to vast reserves of hard-to-reach oil, deposited in shale formations throughout the country. Up until about 20 years ago, these reserves were simply not feasible to extract. The effort and specialty equipment required to extract the crude oil from these locations cost far more than the value of the resources being extracted. As a result, North American oil production began to stagnate around the 1980s when its easy oil reserves begin being irreversible depleted.

But throughout the 1990s, one company stepped up to the plate and began devising techniques and equipment that would allow for the economical extraction of tough oil resources, such as those seen in the Bakken Shale formation in North Dakota. One of the key innovations that Nabors Industries devised during this time was large directional drilling platforms that could simultaneously handle up to 20 different drilling operations. In addition to this, Nabors Industries began developing high tech software solutions, such as its ROCKIT performance drilling software platform, that were able to almost completely automate the extraction process, freeing up site operators to handle only the most pressing tasks.

These initiatives were largely the brainchild of Nabors Industries CEO Tony Petrello. Under Petrello’s leadership, Nabors Industries began following a radically new direction. This was largely predicated upon the development of high-tech solutions to North America’s problem of plentiful but extremely difficult-to-reach oil resources. By 2005, Petrello had transformed Nabors Industries into North America’s premier supplier of directional drilling equipment, hydraulic fracturing technology and multiple drill, portable pads.

This has proven to be an enormously successful strategy, with Nabors Industries being one of the key players in the booming North American oil business. This has almost been an exclusive development of the sudden ability to economically extract North America’s difficult-to-reach oil reserves.